Codeword Golden Fleece (25 page)

In little more than a minute the almost empty street began to fill with running figures. Some emerged from side turnings, others dashed downstairs and out of the doors of the big blocks that were still standing. De Richleau knew that his legs could not save him. He must rely on his wits, and if they failed him, he would be lynched, torn, trampled and kicked to death by the infuriated mob, long before Mack or the police could reach him.

As he came level with the sailor he sprang into the roadway, brushing aside the hands the young man had thrust out to clutch him.

A small car was passing at that moment, moving in the same direction as himself. The people in it were yelling at him, and, swerving towards the pavement, the driver tried to head him off. Instead of attempting to avoid the car, the Duke jumped on its running-board.

The driver was a fat, fair Jew, and beside him sat a pretty little women. She screamed something at the man, on which he jerked forward his feet to declutch, jam down the brake and bring the car to a halt.

De Richleau had a firm grip on the window of the car with his left hand. With his right he pulled out the big automatic without which he now never moved abroad. Jabbing its barrel into the fat man’s neck, he panted: ‘Drive on! Drive on, damn you, or I’ll blow your head off!’

The fat man gave a gasp of fear and took his foot off the brake. The car bounded forward, nearly jerking the Duke off the running-board, and they sped past two blocks with the cries of their infuriated pursuers fading in the distance behind them.

But the advantage gained was only a temporary one. The thoroughfare ahead was half-blocked by the débris of a fallen building, and opposite it a large section of the road had given way, owing to a bomb that tore up twenty yards of pavement.

Too late de Richleau ordered his commandeered Jehu to wheel left down a side turning. The car was already heading for the narrow gap between the heap of rubble and the crater. A careful driver could have made the passage easily, even with a much larger vehicle, but the Jew, either through fright or with a deliberate courage which might easily have cost him his life—the Duke never learned which—swerved too far to the left; his front off-wheel went over the lip of the crater, the car lurched heavily and stopped with a violent jerk that hurled de Richleau from his precarious perch into the middle of the roadway.

His gun was jolted from his hand, but did not go off because the safety-catch was still on. With bruised knees and badly scraped hands, from which the blood immediately began to ooze, he picked himself up. One glance at the car showed him that it could serve him no further. Waiting only to grab up his pistol, he dashed round the edge of the crater which had proved his undoing and down the side street.

Short as it was, the lift on the car had enabled him to regain his breath; but now the fat Jew and his girlfriends were yelling ‘Murder!’ and raising a new hue-and-cry; and, as the Duke shot round the corner, he caught a glimpse of his original pursuers, their numbers augmented by scores of people, racing up the street.

As he ran on he was now in a mood to shoot anyone who attempted to bar his path. Shortage of breath was the one and only thing calculated to make de Richleau really lose his temper. It affected him even when he had to walk upstairs. Two flights were his limit, and if it ever proved necessary for him to pant up a third he was in no mood to be argued with.

Ahead of him were two colourfully dressed and well-rouged ladies; evidently out, war or no war, to find gentlemen friends with whom to pass a quiet but lucrative Sunday afternoon. The cry of ‘Spy! Stop the spy!’ had been taken up behind him. As the ladies caught it the clicking of their high heels ceased upon the pavement, and they turned about.

He charged straight at them, waving his gun threateningly as he came on. One of them gave a shrill scream and jumped for a nearby doorway, but the other stood her ground. As he swerved
to pass her, she lifted her heavy handbag and, swinging it with all her force, caught him a terrific clout on the side of the head.

The blow took him off his balance and all but sent him flying. With one foot across the other he lurched out into the roadway, lipsticks, powder-compact, cigarettes and
zloyties
cascading down his shouders. By a miracle he righted himself and fled on down the street.

Swerving round another corner, he momentarily shook off his pursuers. Still the three o’clock quiet of the Sunday afternoon continued to be his salvation. Every new street he entered was warm, somnolent and almost deserted, its stillness scarcely broken except for the hum of a Nazi reconnaissance aircraft that glinted silvery in the sun, high in the blue skies overhead. Yet, in each, after only a moment the drone of the plane was drowned by the angry shouts of the pursuing mob, more windows were thrown open, more people appeared from doorways, alleys and side turnings to sprinkle the vista ahead as though called up by some magical conjuration.

As he turned the corner the street seemed free of traffic, yet before he had covered twenty yards a single-decker bus rolled past him. It was almost empty and moving only at a moderate pace in order to avoid the bomb-holes and litter which here and there partially blocked the road. Transferring his pistol from his right hand to his left, the Duke put on a sudden spurt, grabbed the rear rail of the bus and swung himself on to it.

The conductor was standing on the platform. As the bus had passed the turning out of which the Duke had come he had had his back to it, so he had not seen the running crowd that was just about to debouch from its end. But the Duke’s now apoplectic face and the gun that he was clutching in his hand showed clearly enough that he was on the run, and the conductor jumped to the reasonable conclusion that the police were after him. Before the fugitive had time to cover him he had seized the bell-pull and jerked it four times, for the driver to stop.

For a moment de Richleau stood on the platform, half-doubled up, gasping like a fish out of water as he strove to regain his breath; then he pointed his weapon at the man and panted hoarsely: ‘Pull—pull that bell again! Signal your driver to go on!’

The conductor backed away, simply putting up his hands above his head as though he had not understood. Both he and the driver had now heard the shouts of the oncoming crowd. In vain the Duke pulled the bell himself; the bus was slowing down.

The idea of facing the driver to drive on at the point of the pistol flashed into de Richleau’s mind, but he abandoned it almost as soon as it occurred to him. There was a metal partition between the passenger compartment and the driver’s seat, so he could not get at the man to threaten him, except by getting off the bus. With the pack running hard behind them too much time would be lost before he could force the fellow to set his vehicle in motion again. As the bus jolted to a halt he jumped off and began to run once more.

The lift on the bus had given him a brief respite and enabled him partially to recover his breath, but he knew that he could not keep going much longer. To his dismay he saw that two hundred yards ahead the street was half-blocked again by a fallen house and that a group of four soldiers was approaching the part where it narrowed.

Suddenly a man ran at him from a nearby doorway. Swerving wildly, de Richleau thrust him off with the swift movement with which a rugby forward out for a try would have foiled a tackle by the opposing full back. The man staggered, overbalanced and sat down with a bump on the pavement, but in a minute he was up again and in hot pursuit only twenty yards behind the Duke.

Before he was halfway to the pile of débris his wind was failing him. Every breath he drew seared his chest like a hot iron; the pain seemed intolerable. The blood was beating in his head, and his eyes were bulging. The swift running steps of the man he had pushed over were gaining on him, and ahead the four soldiers had halted with excited cries. They were spreading out at the far end of the bottleneck made by the rubble, to bar his passage.

The position seemed hopeless, but he was still determined to make a fight for it, and he knew the time had come when he must use his gun. If only he could have explained to these people, he thought with intense bitterness, that he was in real truth their devoted ally, whereas the scoundrel who had set them on to murder him had endeavoured to sell them out to their merciless enemies before the war had even started. But that was impossible, and without the faintest knowledge of the facts they were hounding one another on to do him to death. All right, then, anyone who had the temerity to join in the chase of an armed man did so at his own peril. Their blood was on their own heads.

Raising his pistol, he fired two shots at the little group of
soldiers. Still running, as he was, he could not take deliberate aim at any of then, even had he wished, and they were the best part of a hundred yards away from him. Both shots went wide but had instantaneous effect. Two of the soldiers ran for cover in the nearest doorway, a third dived behind the heap of masonry; only one stood his ground at the far entrance to the bottleneck.

The man behind was now gaining rapidly on the breathless Duke. He had come up to within fifteen feet of his quarry. Half-turning, de Richleau fired again. With a curse, the man hesitated and dropped into a limping trot, the bullet having grazed his thigh.

As he had turned to fire, the Duke had glimpsed the part of the street which lay behind him. It was now half-filled with running people; two hundred at least had joined in the chase. Mack’s car was in the centre of them, but could not forge ahead, or it would have run down some of the leading half-hundred. Well out in the front, a policeman and the young sailor were running neck to neck barely fifty paces behind the now wounded man.

Ahead the soldier still stood squarely in the centre of the gap, and one of his comrades, regaining his nerve, had come out of the doorway to join him. A pistol cracked somewhere in the rear, and its bullet whistled past the Duke’s head. As he had started the firing himself he could not blame the marksman.

He was now in the bottleneck, but he felt nearly done and was practically certain that he no longer had the strength left to evade or fight off the two soldiers. On a sudden inspiration he swerved and began to scramble up the great heap of rubble.

An instant later he was cursing himself for his folly. The bricks and broken stone slipped and slithered beneath his feet. He felt that he would have stood a better chance if he had shot one of the soldiers at point-blank range and sought to slip past the other. But it was too late to think of that now. The pile of débris rose at an increasingly sharp angle to a height of about twenty-five feet. He was not halfway up it before the panting, shouting mob arrived at its foot.

The policeman, the sailor and half a dozen other men began to scramble after him, but one of the soldiers won him a temporary respite by shouting: ‘Come back there! He’s armed! He’ll shoot you if you corner him! Leave this to us!’

As he yelled his warning he was quickly loading his rifle, but his comrade in the doorway across the street had had the same idea and was already raising his weapon to his shoulder.

The report of the rifle echoed above the tumult of the crowd. At the second the Duke heard it the bullet pinged upon a piece of brick which an instant before had been covered by his body. But now the crowd had rounded on the soldiers with cries of ‘Stop shooting! He’s a spy—shooting’s too good for him! We want him alive! Come on, boys; up you go! Lynch him! Lynch him!’

As the leaders of the mob began to climb again de Richleau, half-blinded by sweat and dust, heaved himself up on to the top of the pile. He was now faced by the remains of an interior wall of the gutted house in which an open door hung, crookedly, still supported by one of its hinges. To scale the mound he had had to thrust his pistol into his pocket. With a torn and bleeding hand he pulled it out again.

He was old enough to face most forms of death with a certain equanimity and he had always hoped that when his time came he would die cleanly and quickly from a bullet; but one type of death that he had never visualised for himself was to be torn limb from limb by a hooligan-incited crowd driven temporarily insane by the hardships and horrors of relentless bombing. It seemed now that such a fate had unquestionably been reserved for him, but the idea of mob-law, whether applied to himself or anyone else, had always filled him with intense repugnance. Even half-crazy as he had been driven by breathlessness and pain, he had instinctively recoiled from the thought of killing the soldiers who had courageously barred his path down in the street; but no such scruples weighed with him one iota where this human pack, that was surging up to overwhelm him, was concerned. Levelling his pistol, he emptied its remaining contents into the mass of struggling figures halfway up the mound.

One screamed and slumped upon the slope of broken bricks; another threw up his arms and pitched backwards, carrying several of those nearest with him. A howl of rage and execration went up from the watching throng, which now blocked the whole street for a length of a hundred yards and was still rapidly increasing. But the rest of the climbers stopped in their tracks, not knowing that the Duke had now exhausted his ammunition.

Seizing this new advantage as a last forlorn hope, de Richleau stumbled to the gaping doorway in the ruined wall. Beyond it the further side of the house had also collapsed from another bomb in the same stick as that which had brought down its front. The ruin was open to the heavens, the next standing wall
was a good fifty yards away; all trace of the room beyond the doorway had disappeared, except for a small square landing from which led down a narrow flight of partially wrecked stairs.

The stairs descended in two flights to a brick-scattered tiled floor on the ground level, which had doubtless been the hall of the building. The banisters had disappeared, and part of the lower flight had been blasted away, leaving a gaping hole through which could be seen some stone steps leading to a cellar. At a normal time no man in his senses would have risked stepping out on to the rickety landing without a rope round him and companions to check his fall, if the loose boards should collapse beneath him. But for the Duke no hesitation was possible; death from a hundred fists and boots was following hard on his heels. The mob would have recovered its courage in another few moments, and, more infuriated than ever by the casualties he had caused, it would resume its remorseless man-hunt. Still panting from his exertions, he dived through the doorway, and, keeping as close to the wall as possible, ran towards the stairs.